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User talk:AnonymousMothman
Welcome Hi, welcome to Creepypasta Wiki! Thanks for your edit to the Mothman page. Please be sure to read all of the Site Rules, as it is important to follow them. Failure to abide by them may result in your account being blocked. Read some new pastas by checking out or browse by topic by checking out the Genre Listing. You can also read some of the best stories our wiki has to offer by checking out Suggested Reading. Finally, you can check out stories written by authors of the wiki in User Stories. Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! ClericofMadness (talk) 07:28, December 29, 2018 (UTC) Welcome Hi, welcome to Creepypasta Wiki! Thanks for your edit to the Mothman page. Please be sure to read all of the Site Rules, as it is important to follow them. Failure to abide by them may result in your account being blocked. Read some new pastas by checking out or browse by topic by checking out the Genre Listing. You can also read some of the best stories our wiki has to offer by checking out Suggested Reading. Finally, you can check out stories written by authors of the wiki in User Stories. Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! ClericofMadness (talk) 07:29, December 29, 2018 (UTC) Re: Intention/Themes It's a difficult question to answer, but if I had to give it ("How would I know if people could understand my message") an answer I would say that a lot of understanding a message relies on how it's presented and the style. A story can sometimes be read at face value without delving into the topic at hand if there aren't any breadcrumbs for the audience to follow. There is also always the possibility that people are just going to overlook underlying themes as they're not essential to understanding the story. Getting a theme/point/idea across can be achieved through the characters (their opinions, emotions, mindset, responses to events, etc.), narrative voice, or how the information is presented in the writing itself. Stylistically, I would advise against esoteric/overly-complicated/archaic words (someone once described a fog as 'insalubrious' and gave no other descriptors which, with a mountain of other similar descriptions lead to their story coming across as over-written since it was a modern day haunted house story told by a protagonist who was a child and likely didn't have the capacity to write like that given their background.) and overly focused purple prose. While a little bit of variation and interesting wordplay can spice up a story, delving too deep into it can distract from the point and muddy the waters. Faulkner and Hemingway infamously had an argument on this when Faulkner said that Hemingway had 'never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary' as an insult. Hemingway responded: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" I end up siding with Hemingway in this aspect as a simply worded phrase can convey the point easily whereas a more eloquently worded phrase is more likely to send people to the dictionaries (if they are that focused) and more likely to mis-interpret the overall theme/point of the story. All that being said, writing style is an author's choice. I like to pepper a story with alliteration, assonance, and some more academic words from time to time, but I'm also aware that relying too heavily on more complex words can detract from the story if it complicates or becomes overly focused on the description (a full paragraph visually describing a character's attire in vivid detail might break the flow of a story). A final little bit of advice I can give would be to have people read your story and take their feedback into account. You can guide them a little by prefacing it with concerns ("I'm wondering if audience is going to infer this part" or "I'm not sure if this dialogue conveys the point I want to make about _____"). Generally feedback can help you as an author figure out how you want to best approach a story to convey the overall theme/point to the audience. I hope that helps. EmpyrealInvective (talk) 20:52, February 17, 2019 (UTC)